If it needs saying, this alternative syntax is excellent for improving legibility (for both PHP and HTML!) in situations where you have a mix of them.

Interface templates are very often in need of this, especially since the PHP code in them is usually written by one person (who is more of a programmer) and the HTML gets modified by another person (who is more of a web designer). Clear separation in such cases is extremely useful.

See the default templates that come with WordPress 1.5+ (www.wordpress.org) for practical and smart examples of this alternative syntax.

The reason for the "workaround" jeremiah mentioned, in the case of the switch statement, can be understood as follows; in any place where you can have an echo statement (an if block, a switch's case, whatever), that's where you can have the raw HTML. In PHP this basically gets handled just like that -- like an echo statement.

In between a switch and a case, though, you can't echo anything. By placing the switch and the case in two separate blocks of PHP, with a raw HTML newline echo'ed in between them, PHP basically had to try to find where that statement would be. And it can't be there, hence the difficulty.

The reason temec987's approach of using boolean operators as an alternative to control structures won't work for an 'echo' is because the result of evaluating the expression will always be a boolean.

Other languages (e.g. ruby) are much better suited to this approach, as the expression evaluated will be the resultant value, e.g.:5 && 4

In ruby, this would be 4, but in PHP, this would be true (type-juggled equivalent is 1), which isn't useful for anything but further binary logic.

You can still use logical operators as conditionals, but only for executing logic, not for getting a value back, e.g.:<?phpdefined('USER_CAN_EXECUTE') or die('Access denied.');?>

is a nice one to use for access control, or say you want to put in a quick check that your object has all the data loaded it needs to call a webservice (functions are just examples):<?php$this->readyForService() and $this->postData('http://endpoint.com');?>

What you can't use them for is something like this:<?phpecho (strlen($mystring) > 5) and $mystring;?>